Sketchbooks: My Personal Creative Practice by Lisa Sonora

Your Digital Edition will be available for download immediately — from your purchase confirmation email!

Since childhood, I’ve kept visual diaries in blank sketchbooks. My writing illustrated with drawings, collage and photographs. While I messed with combining writing and mixed-media techniques, I never considered what occurred in my sketchbooks art.

In fact, I was never formally trained in writing or visual art at all. My educational degrees and professional trainings are in music, therapy, and business administration. Diverse career paths further confounded by my need to write and paint…and travel and study with all manner of spiritual teachers.

The writing and image-making I did in my sketchbooks were not art, but explorations that helped me survive a difficult childhood, then find my way in the world as an passionate creative, uncertain of her true gifts, or the right medium or career in which to share them.

“I recently bought “Sketchbooks” and wanted to share some private thoughts. First of all a huge THANK YOU for writing it.

It helped me in ways I hardly can describe with words. The mixture of your raw writing from your heart and the visuals in between are so powerful and courageous. SO GOOD.

For me it felt like big soul sister energy I received.” – excerpt from a letter to Lisa by Uma, from Austria

It was in the late 1980’s, when I was a young therapist working in psychiatric hospitals, that I began to teach others how to use expressive writing and image-making for healing and insight. I showed my patients how to keep their own sketchbooks when I hit a wall with significantly traumatized girls, finding that talk therapy got us nowhere. What they needed were some simple tools and a private space to mine their own inner wisdom.

These days, my sketchbooks still continue to document the process of art-making, life navigating and business building. Along the way I’ve had the privilege of sharing my process with thousands of people outside of psychiatric hospitals—from teen delinquents in jail, stalled artists, engineers running global technology companies, genocide survivors in Rwanda, and every manner of creative soul in between. Everyone benefits from having permission, and a process, for confronting the blank page of their life.

“I am so proud of you for sharing your story. You are brave. And in your bravery, you are a healer.” — Sam Tucker

What You’ll Find in Sketchbooks:

It’s writing, it’s work-in-progress, it’s thought experiments, it’s what I’m reading that inspires me and what I see in the world that gives me hope.

It’s the raw edge of creation, where ideas, passion, and excitement intersect with doubt and fear.

It’s about my dreams and ideas, and how I work toward making them real. It’s about the rougher edge of creativity, where the destructive tendencies are rooted and how I wrestle with those, too.

It’s how I deal with money, in a crazy economy as a single, self-employed artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S.

It’s how I crave belonging and connection and community, and yet am by nature a hermit, a true introvert, who is shy and prone to isolation.

It’s my living experiment with art-making, economics, marketing, and how the intersection of all these makes thriving (and sometimes just surviving) as a working artist possible in the 21st century.

The Story of Sketchbooks

Sketchbooks was originally published as a sort of digital apprenticeship. More than any formal education, there is a particular kind of learning that you get by apprenticing, being in the studio or at the office and watching someone work.

Much of what I’ve learned about creativity, healing, courage—and being able to support myself as a self-employed artist for more than 20 years—comes from watching and learning from people who were already doing what I wanted to do. So this is one way I’d like to pass it on.

An apprentice learns about the lifestyle of the artist, how they manage the details and derailments, and still get their work out the door. For over a year, I shared excerpts from my sketchbooks in the form of a twice-monthly paid email subscription.

Each issue documented my own creative practice, composed in the moment and from typed excerpts of my handwritten blank books. Readers could virtually peer over my shoulder as I worked and interact if they wished. The next best thing to getting to hang out in the studio together.

While there are some opportunities to come and work with me in person, I didn’t want geography, travel and the associated time and expense to be limiting factors. And while I create online courses, too, the focus of on the content of the course and the experience of the students, not on my personal process. Sketchbooks offers readers insight into my own private creative practice.

Since I’m a self-employed artist who also guides other creatives in making a living from their work, I like to lead by example. This means trying a lot of different things to see what resonates with my audience. It means putting out work for sale in the marketplace to see what works, and what doesn’t.

This compilation of Sketchbooks into a book length form is something that subscribers of Sketchbooks asked for. So this book is yet another experiment. Each chapter in this book represents one of the original issues sent by email.

While I never went back and read previous issues before sending out another, there are narrative threads that flow through these pieces.

This mirrors how my sketchbooks are actually created. I don’t work in one book at a time, and don’t work on pages in order. Since the creative process is non-linear, I submit to this seeming lack of order. But by the time a volume is full, it’s always surprising to see a story within that unfolds in a sequence from beginning to end.

In Sketchbooks, you’ll get an inside look at how my creative practice provides a solid foundation and support for taking bigger and bigger leaps into the unknown. Sometimes this looks like getting through the day, more or less in one piece.

This is what allows me to thrive, (and sometimes simply survive) as an artist, while I heal wounds from the past, stay awake in this moment, and keep growing into the future. My hope is that you find ideas and inspiration that you can use to navigate your own journey.

“Thank you for offering Sketchbooks, they are soooooooo helpful!

It’s always good to get the next issue! I go to my bedroom, lie across the bed and read. I pause along the way to reflect on what you’re written or any issues it brings up for me. Your sketchbook is an indulgence I give to myself and I relish it.

I count you as one of my few artist role models. Your suggestions and ideas work for me and I feel a sense of kinship.”

– Indigene Theresa Gaskin / Visual Artist and founder of Indigene Art

Anyone who wants to do something they’ve never done before, or find their unique creative voice, needs to develop skills for dealing with unfamiliar territory. The frontier of the unknown causes discomfort and disorientation. My Sketchbooks document my journey along this path.

How To Order

Purchase Now and start reading right away!

Digital Edition of Sketchbooks: My Personal Creative Practice

$20.

Digital Edition: .pdf document. 500 pages.

Your Digital Edition will be available for download immediately — from your purchase confirmation email!

Context: $20 bucks is what generous benefactors paid per month…just to get two issues. Some of them paid $10 for a single back issue.

Hi Lisa! Just discovered your site and subscribed today! Yay! Love your content! A quick question…I see that “Sketchbooks” has a sale price of $10 listed next to it (but then it also says thru August). Is that sale price still available by chance? Thank you!

Hi Lisa…just ordered your book and downloaded it to my desktop…no problem. However, I’ve tried to open it on my Smart phone and a message comes up “CANNOT OPEN” It downloaded ok but can’t be opened or read. Any ideas????

Just found you…I would really be interested in a paperback book of your “sketchbooks” I enjoy your art and will be purchasing The creative Entrepreneur . Hope to hear from you Lisa, you area brave and lovely person.

We promote writing to elementary schools. I like what I see here. We should talk and see how we might be able to help each other. Where do you live? I travel a lot so it might be coincidental that we might cross paths in the near future.

thanks for asking, Cynthia – right now there is no hard copy available – just the .pdf digital edition. This can be read on your computer, or other devices like phone or tablet with a Kindle app, for example.

I certainly prefer reading paper books – and would love to create a bound edition.

It is in my project list for this year. looking for the right editor to work with on this first, as the digital edition is largely my unedited journals – which honestly I don’t feel ready to put out into the world at large.

Because this will mean reviews on Amazon, etc. and I can’t even look at reviews of The Creative Entrepreneur – which is not a personal book at all.

Having this edition on my website is my first step, and it challenges me.

Hey Lisa, I’m still interested in a hard copy. If it when it becomes available, then please let me know! 🙂 I will probably order your pdf first, but would love to have something bound! Wishing you the best in 2015!!

re: printed edition of the project – I am dreaming up ideas for that! Thanks for asking. If you stay subscribed to the project email list, you’ll be the first know when available. I’d really like to do this.

Am listening to the Dirty Footprints discussion about this book now. Checked it out, loved the title and table of contents and read some of the excerpts on your site. Loved Creative Entrepren. Ate it up. Was so inspired and moved by what I read in Sketchbooks, had to get it now. Would like to get the print version in time if its still available. For now, got the digital.

Hola! I'm Lisa Sonora. ME: an American artist and author living in Mexico. YOU: Crave more creativity, more meaning, more adventures — and are tired of the same old stuff getting in your way. Creativity + Travel + Courage has been the theme of my blog since 2002, and sums up my life mission: to dare to make my life a creative adventure and to help women create more, stress less, and take meaningful, once-in-a-lifetime creative journeys. Welcome to my virtual studio. It’s messy in here.
But not as messy as my real studio. My real studio is located in Oaxaca, Mexico, and you’re invited to come visit and create.